In this day and age, and especially within the gaming industry, the use of affiliate marketing is becoming increasingly popular. These affiliates are typically users that have a larger following on social media like Twitter, YouTube and Twitch. As these ‘Influencers’ have an established following it can make it easier to develop a target market as there are certain traits these viewers or followers will be attracted to that can be displayed by their chosen Influencer.

It is not just games that are promoted through affiliate marketing, as there are a lot of influencers who involve themselves in communities online that focus on everyday things, such as clothes and makeup. Affiliate marketing works because of the connection that this affiliate has with their audience.

 Something to be cautious of though, is larger influencers can cost more to work with to promote your game or product. This can vary the result of the marketing as the audience may not take to your product as well as you think and could end up costing the project rather than benefiting it.

Affiliate marketing is commonly split into 3 groups, The Creator, The Affiliate and The Customer;

The Creator is pretty self-explanatory, it’s the person, group or company that is making the product, The Affiliate is our Influencer who is approached by the Creator to promote the product and will be paid to do so likely through set commission or through portions of sales brought in by them typically through a code or link. And finally, The Customer, the person(s) you are trying to have your product reach through this method, they are shown the product by the affiliate and choose whether or not to purchase it and try it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-uceZTvWG0

The link just above is an example of affiliate marketing on YouTube. Channel ‘New Rockstars’ content focuses on breaking down and explaining many movies, shows and trailers, showing you what you might have missed and adding inputs with theories for what can happen. In this video above, there is a trailer being broken down and a little over halfway through the video there is a promotion for ‘Shudder’ which provides a streaming service for Horror films and shows. During this promotion is referred to as the “Netflix for Horror”. New Rockstars provide a link to the service and have a promo code to use when a user signs up which will likely be at least part of the payment received for this promotion. The code provided gives users 30 Days free as a trial for the service where users can then subscribe to the service for a monthly fee.

Patel, N., n.d. Affiliate Marketing Made Simple: A Step-By-Step Guide. [online] Neil Patel. Available at: <https: neilpatel.com="" what-is-affiliate-marketing=""></https:> [Accessed 3 June 2020].